Class Notes:
The Centenary of T.S. Eliot at Harvard 1910-2010
By Carey Adina Karmel, Harvard Class of 1979
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n June 24, 1910, in a procession that overflowed Harvard Square to the Stadium, a scrawny 21-year-old Thomas Stearns Eliot graduated from Harvard College in an all-white male class one-tenth today's size. Hospitalized that May for suspected scarlet fever, Eliot narrowly made the ceremony to deliver the Ode he penned for the Class of 1910.
Harvard's lifelong influence on the modernist expatriate poet is evidenced by more than the B.A. and M.A. diplomas with which Eliot departed the Yard that commencement day a century ago. Harvard professors such as Irving Babbitt and George Santayana stirred Eliot the student and stoked his creativity as a writer. The Harvard University Archives includes Eliot's original transcript, and his curriculum. Here too from Houghton is Eliot's typescript of "Lyric,” the existential poem printed in the June 3, 1907 issue of The Harvard Advocate, the literary magazine where he and Conrad Aiken became friends. By commencement, Eliot had published a half dozen poems in The Advocate; like a typical undergraduate, Eliot tried on various identities and experimented, sometimes signing his poetry Thomas S. Eliot, sometimes T. Stearns Eliot. It seems that by his final year, Eliot scribbled the fragments of verse about his alter ego which would end up in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (the first edition is displayed below).
In Eliot’s era, only seniors lived in the Yard, an earned privilege of proximity to classrooms. He no longer had to meander the Cambridge “streets that follow like a tedious argument” (v. 18). In 1909, his distant cousin, President Charles William Eliot had stepped down after 40 years, the longest reign in the University's history. President Eliot had created the Hogwarts look of Harvard: its wrought iron gates, multi-colored Memorial Hall and the Romanesque Sever Hall where lectures and seminars replaced recitations and chapel. Correspondence with Eliot's parents suggest, ironically, that President Eliot's then- innovative elective system overwhelmed the young poet and landed him on probation in the fall of his freshman year. Gradually, Eliot "squeezed the universe into a ball to roll it toward some overwhelming question." (v. 92, 93). Harvard reversed the probation a year later. Eliot would work for more than the next five years on a PhD in philosophy and for a lifetime on the most important essays and poems of the 20th century.
I would like to thank Dr. Ronald Schuchard of Emory University; Leslie Morris and Heather Cole of Houghton Library; and Robin McElheny and Tim Driscoll of Harvard University Archives for help in the conception and execution of this exhibition; and Medb Mahony Sichko and my family for their support.
1910 Class Album. Harvard University Archives, HUD 310.04.5
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" lines 42-43
T.S. Eliot undergraduate transcript. Harvard University Archives, UAIII 15.75.12
T.S. Eliot. “Defense of Kipling.” For Charles T. Copeland, English 12, 1909. Harvard University Archives, HUG 4298.65
(left) T. S. Eliot. Prufrock and other observations. London, The Egoist Ltd., 1917. Houghton *AC9 Eℓ464 917p
(right) Dante Alighieri. The Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri. London: Dent, 1909. T.S. Eliot’s copy. Houghton *AC9.Eℓ464.Zz910t Gift of Henry Ware Eliot.
Throughout his oeuvre, Eliot's epigraphs and references to Dante are profuse, and that intense influence started during Eliot's undergraduate days. The page displayed here shows the lines Eliot used as the epigraph in “Prufrock”.
E. Wells. Letter (carbon) to Henry Eliot, 4 December 1906. Harvard University Archives, UAIII 15.88.10
T.S. Eliot is placed on academic probation.
Harvard College (1780- ). Class of 1910. Harvard class day, 1910. [Cambridge, Mass., 1910] Houghton AC9 Eℓ464 A910h Gift of Henry Ware Eliot.
Eliot wrote and recited the class “Ode.”
T.S. Eliot. "If space and time.” Typescript (carbon) [1905] Houghton b MS Am 1691 (128)
This was published in the Harvard Advocate 83:7 (3 June 1907)
